This game relates to the card game of contract bridge. It permits two or three persons to bid and play the conventional game of bridge, using a standard point count bidding system of the type used in the four-handed version of the game. Regular four-handed contract bridge as played by two pairs of opposing teams consists of two primary parts, (1) bidding and (2) play of the hand. Bidding occurs with all hands "closed", i.e., being viewed solely by the individual holding the hand. Various bidding systems have been developed for partners to generally define their closed hands to each other in an attempt to reach a contract that will produce the highest score possible when their combined hands are subsequently played. The person on the highest bidding team who first bids the suit in which the contract is to be played is known as Declarer. The Declarer's partner is known as the dummy hand, commonly just called Dummy. Once the defending team presents the opening lead card of the first trick, Dummy displays all cards of his entire hand face up on the table and sits out the hand while Declarer plays both his and Dummy's hands against the defending team. Thus, each of the three active players can view his own and Dummy's hand, but cannot see the other two concealed hands. The goal of the defending team is to improve their score by defeating or "setting" the contract which was bid by their opponents.
As discussed in my U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,009,884 and 4,119,322, numerous attempts have been made to develop a 2 or 3-handed bridge game which has the basic bidding and playing aspects of the true 4-handed game. Until the concepts of my earlier patents were developed, however, no bridge game appears to have even remotely approached that goal. Such other games lacked not only the accuracy of bidding required, but were generally played quite differently than the 4-handed game as well.